| Creative writing in an academic setting can be difficult enough without being used at the hands of your hero. Larry Campbell is one young man who learns this, the hard, drunken way, in Lynn Coady’s new novel, Mean Boy.
Larry goes to university in order to take poetry from his idol and later confidante Jim Arsenault. He adores the poet’s work, which inspires him to make the precarious decision to make a living as one, too. Amongst readings, ramblings and benders, he comes to learn that perhaps being a writer doesn’t mean emulating tragic or false prophets.
Coady began Mean Boy after being inspired by the tragic final years of famed poet John Thompson. The further she delved into his biography, though, the more it seemed as if the booze and depression that absorbed him didn’t lend itself to the satiric novel she was writing. "What grabbed me was the fact that here was this brilliant poet in this undergraduate university, whose tenure was denied (and later saved by protests by his students) and who, in his later years, started messing up," she says. That hard-drinking poet lifestyle was one that, as a young writer, Coady wanted to emulate, and in writing the novel, she sought to explore how he "inspired that devotion."
If Thompson’s life had its stirrings in the creation of Jim Arsenault, Larry’s did with Coady, too, although their approaches opposed each other. "I structured Larry’s coming of age as being outside, whereas mine was internal," says Coady. It was something that, growing up in Cape Breton, fuelled the archetype of the writer who lives fast and dies young. "He has a young man’s confidence," she says of Larry. "My dramas took place through my experiences – the bad-boy-as-a-drunk was what I was going to do. As I got older and encountered people like Jim, I discovered how empty that posturing was."
The marriage of academia and art is endlessly debated, Larry’s father making one of the most convincing arguments against it while he interrogates his son.
"They’ve always fit together uneasily," says Coady. "My attitude is that most apprentice writers have to just read and write. The world doesn’t really furnish that however, and creative writing programs provide that. Academia can be a necessary evil in general and derail the process, too. If you can get a mentor you can trust, it can work – if Jim was a good person, it could’ve been good to Larry. The downside is, he isn’t."
Many ask and praise Coady about the presence of Cape Breton in her novels, particularly Saints of Big Harbour. In Mean Boy, the East Coast stays on the periphery, where she wants it. "I’ve mapped that territory – I’m done with it now," she says. "Artists should drag those stereotypes out of the quagmires, they’re tedious. With Mean Boy, I wanted to write a campus novel – it’s a bizarre dichotomy, privileged people in these university communities alongside rural Acadians."
Her next novel will delve further into the shadows, a darker side that she usually feels the pull towards. "With this novel, I didn’t know what I was doing. It wanted to be a lot of different things – it could’ve been a lot darker, Larry’s coming of age," says Coady. "What was hardest to deal with was his sexuality – I didn’t want to go down that path."
What Larry finds is an attraction to mother figures – idealized, safe, fleshy. Part of the creation of Jim’s wife Moira as a foul-mouthed waif was to have "Larry bump against these proclivities of Jim," says Coady, the opposite of things he expects from his idol.
Mean Boy is bitingly funny and dark. Coady laces her tale with satiric poison – just enough to follow Larry through his adventure with Jim, and see him safely, if not appropriately jaded, out the other side. |
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